Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  There were nearly a hundred deaths and over seventy wounded in the course of the assault. These were mainly minor tradesmen and artisans, one of whom was a woman, a laundress. Such casualties became instant martyrs in the legends of the city. The Governor of the fortress, the Marquis de Launay, was killed by the furious crowd after his surrender, together with another official; their heads were paraded through the streets on pikes. There were fantastic reports afterwards of the discovery of secret cartloads of grain intended for the King’s personal consumption, or of wagons, emblazoned with the Queen’s arms and loaded with clothes for her to use as a disguise. In fact a total of seven prisoners of state—two madmen, four forgers and one nobly born criminal—were released.12

  The security of Paris against mob rule was immediately thrown into question by this day of bloodshed and destruction. The ordinary Gardes Françaises, who had held to their duties at the time of the Réveillon riots in April, could no longer be counted upon to keep order. Where, then, were the Swiss Guards, under their colonel, the Baron de Besenval, that amusing man who had enjoyed membership of the Queen’s Private Society for so long? Besenval was widely blamed by both sides for withdrawing the Swiss to Saint Cloud instead of standing fast to prevent the tumult spreading. Royalists believed that Besenval, now in his late sixties, had acted thus in order to distract the mob’s attention from his Paris home, which was stocked with art treasures. Revolutionaries were convinced of the exact opposite: that Besenval had deliberately left the mob to do their worst, in order that Paris itself might be destroyed.13

  This was symptomatic of the growing incomprehension between the various parties. The Parisian bourgeoisie began to see in the National Assembly their bulwark not so much against royal authority as against mob rule. Meanwhile the King wrote “rien” for 14 July in his Journal.14 It was true that there had been no hunting; but Louis XVI did not even give the Fall of the Bastille that brief mention he had accorded to the death of Vergennes, the departure of Necker and a few other major political events.

  So the ancient stones of the Bastille, that symbol of oppression, were beaten down. As Bailly wrote in his memoirs: “Holy august Liberty, for the first time, was introduced to the reign of horror, that fearful abode of despotism.” Thereafter fragments of the stone were set into brooches and bracelets, as symbols of liberty. In a further outbreak of radical chic, buckles were fashioned in the shape of the towers of the Bastille, and a bonnet à la Bastille, also a tower but trimmed with tricolour ribbon, became all the rage.15 The red, white and blue tricolour itself sprang into prominence in the shape of innumerable cockades. Green, the traditional colour of liberty, was originally suggested by a radical deputy and journalist called Camille Desmoulins; awkwardly enough, this was also the colour of Artois’ livery. In the end red and blue, the colours of Paris, separated by the Bourbon white, were adopted; fortunately these were the colours of the popular Duc d’Orléans—the subject of so much enthusiastic acclamation these days.16

  The Queen, who would come to dislike the tricolour enormously—but in private—passed the day of 14 July, like the rest of the court, in ignorance of what was taking place in Paris. Nor was anyone, it seemed, in a hurry to tell the King. He was in bed when the Duc de Liancourt, an aristocrat of liberal sympathies, broke the news.

  “Is it a revolt?” asked Louis XVI.

  “No, Sire,” came Liancourt’s reply (which there is no reason to suppose he did not make). “It is a revolution!”17

  In seething Paris, a National Guard or citizens’ militia was formed, under the command of La Fayette, with the tricolour as its badge, to replace the Gardes Françaises; further militias were created all over France. The astronomer Bailly was elected Mayor of Paris. These developments were less immediately important to Versailles than the future of the court. There was an acute sense of panic at the violence, apparently unstoppable, that had recently taken place. King and Queen united in believing that particular targets of popular wrath should probably withdraw for the time being from France.

  The day after the storming of the Bastille—15 July—the King visited the National Assembly in its salon at Versailles. Mirabeau put a stop to the applause that greeted the sovereign with the ominous words: “The people’s silence is a lesson for kings.” Louis was, however, acclaimed as he returned “on foot,” as he noted in his Journal. It was not until the next day that he made the real concessions demanded by the Assembly: the abandonment of the new ministers including Breteuil who had held office for a mere “Hundred Hours,” and the recall of Necker on the simple but radical grounds that the people wanted him back. Before that, a vital discussion took place behind closed doors as to who should flee where and when. The timing was the easiest thing to decide. In view of the hatred felt for the Duchesse de Polignac (back from England), notorious as the extravagant and vicious favourite of the Queen, it was thought right for the Polignac family, husband, wife and children, to leave at once for the Swiss border. Others counselled to go were the Comte and Comtesse d’Artois, the Princes of the Blood, Condé and Conti, and Marie Antoinette’s reader, the Abbé de Vermond, her confidential advisor for twenty years.

  Everyone wept at the scene of farewell. At first Yolande de Polignac refused to go, but the Queen was in agonies of fear every moment the favourite remained in France. In floods of tears, Marie Antoinette told her: “I am terrified of everything; in the name of our friendship go, now is the time for you to escape from the fury of my enemies.” She pointed out that in attacking the Duchesse, they were really attacking the Queen, adding: “Don’t be the victim of your attachment to me, and my friendship for you.” At this point the King entered. Marie Antoinette asked him to help her persuade “these good people, these faithful friends” that “they must leave us.” The King then joined his pleas to hers, telling them that he had just commanded the Comte d’Artois’ departure, and he would repeat the same order to them: “Don’t lose a single minute.”18

  By now the King, whose genuine affection for Yolande was not simply a by-product of her usefulness to the Queen, was in tears as well. It was an intimacy that would be attested in the future by his informal correspondence with Yolande when she was in exile; some of these letters would be unwontedly self-revelatory, as when he disclosed how much popular accusations of greed had hurt him. But perhaps his last reported words to her, which were most kindly meant, went to the heart of the Polignac character: “I will keep on your charges.” By this the King meant those paid positions for which the Polignacs could no longer carry out their duties.

  At midnight Marie Antoinette sent a last message to Yolande: “Adieu! the most tender of friends. This word is terrible to pronounce but it must be said. Here is the order for the horses. I have no more strength left except to embrace you.” The Polignacs took three days and three nights to reach Switzerland, during which time the Duchesse was disguised as a maid. In Basle she adopted for the time being the pseudonym of “Madame Erlanger” for the purpose of correspondence, as not only Louis XVI but also Marie Antoinette poured out their fears to her in their letters; the Queen followed the progress of Yolande’s family, whom she considered her adopted children, with as much keenness as if they had been her own.

  The significance of the flight of the most right-wing members of the royal entourage, including the Polignacs, was twofold. First of all, Marie Antoinette was back in that position of loneliness which she had taken so much trouble to avoid by forming intense female relationships, by joining, in effect, the Polignac set and by creating her Private Society. Whatever the ups and downs of her feelings for the Duchesse, those clouds and changes that sometimes marred the beauty of the day, in the words of Tilly, it had been an enormously long friendship—it was fourteen years since Count Mercy had first bewailed Yolande’s rise to favour. At this sad time, it was natural for the Queen to dwell more on her memories of emotional dependency, than on the recent cooling-off, particularly as the summer had once more brought the Queen closer to Artois and the Polignacs
, in the political sense. In September, Louis wrote to Madame Erlanger (Yolande) about her unnamed “friend” (Marie Antoinette). She was “keeping well” but, being “much tormented by all that passed,” was especially sad that she did not have “the consolation of friendship round her.”19

  The second, more politically serious effect of the flight, which was followed by a flood of emigrating aristocrats, was to create a centre of would-be royal policy outside France. Provence, next heir to the throne after the four-year-old Louis Charles, was still at Versailles, but Artois and his sons were outside the reach of the revolutionaries, whatever their intentions might be towards the monarchy. The first stop of Artois, with his Savoyard wife, was Turin, the capital of his father-in-law the King of Sardinia; the Duchesse de Polignac also subsequently arrived there. The Princes of the Blood ended up in Coblenz in Germany. Here rumours and conspiracies were equally rife. In particular there was a story that the Duc d’Orléans might be adopted as king, or even as Regent for Louis Charles. The pamphlets pouring forth from the Palais-Royal were extremely favourable to the radical Duc, and “Long live Orléans!” became a popular placard. All this might be nothing more than provocation but certainly the potential royal rights of Artois and his sons were threatened by any suggestion of an Orléanist succession. The Queen, however, who had remained in France, was no longer part of their counsels, as she had been during the summer interlude. Insofar as her interests and those of her surviving son were bound up with the fate of Louis XVI, she was now in a subtle sense on the opposite side to the émigré Princes.

  Why did the Queen stay behind? The question must arise, because she was by far the most unpopular member of the court. The answer lies in Marie Antoinette’s concept of duty. Frightened as she was by the grim spectre of her unpopularity and apprehensive that there might be worse to follow, Marie Antoinette was nevertheless determined to preserve her position as the King’s wife and the Dauphin’s mother. In some quarters there was beginning to be talk of putting aside the wicked Queen—possibly into a convent, that traditional receptacle of inconvenient royal females. It was relevant in this connection that, while there was as yet no legal divorce in France, one of the penalties for adultery on the part of the wife was to be shut up in a convent for two years (after a whipping); if her husband happened to die during this period, the erring woman was obliged to remain cloistered for the rest of her natural life.20

  The immurement of Marie Antoinette was not a new idea. As long ago as the Diamond Necklace Affair, the benevolent Duc de Penthièvre, father-in-law of the Princesse de Lamballe, had supposedly declared that in view of the threat to public morality, it would be prudent to shut up the Queen in the convent of Val-de-Grâce. The rumour continued to circulate. Now Queen Charlotte in England reported on 28 July 1789 that apartments were being prepared for the French queen at Val-de-Grâce: “for Safety as some say but others say that the Third Estate insist upon her going there.” It was not true; neither was it true that Marie Antoinette was obliged to go first to Paris, accompanied by the Dauphin, and give formal thanks at Notre-Dame “for the Revolution that has taken place.” Yet a madman who declared publicly at the Palais-Royal that the Queen should be shut up in a convent, after taking the King and his son to Paris, was loudly applauded.21

  There was general talk of excluding queens from the role of Regent—despite the traditional right of a Queen of France to act for her young son— citing the same Salic Law that forbade females from succeeding to the French throne. These observations were deliberately pointed at Marie Antoinette: no “stranger,” that is, one foreign born, should have any part in a Regency.22 Rumours apart, getting rid of the Queen in a non-violent manner remained an interesting option for those like La Fayette, who did not envisage the abolition of all royal authority, yet saw in the Queen an obvious area of weakness in the King’s situation. The Queen, however, viewed this same situation in quite a different light. Latterly it had become her explicit double duty to bolster up the King with her wifely strength, while providing maternal care for the Dauphin. Separation would prevent her carrying out those duties on the one hand, while providing ammunition for her enemies to make an assault on her status.

  If the Queen would not go alone, why did the King, Queen and royal children not move to some more secure place after the outrageous demonstration of violence on 14 July? One possibility was Metz, in the north-west of France on the Moselle. This was one of the strongest fortresses in Europe and it was also not far from the borders of both Germany and the Netherlands. It was the suggestion of Breteuil, endorsed by Artois, and according to Madame Campan, Marie Antoinette approved the idea, ordering her packing to begin.23 Then the King, as usual, took advice. Unfortunately it was conflicting, and the strongest character present, in terms of influence over Louis XVI, the Comte de Provence, advised staying put. The old Marshal de Broglie also challenged his master’s decision to go.

  Much later the King told Fersen, in a confidence that was not without self-pity, that he regretted missing the opportunity of 14 July. “I should have gone then and I wanted to, but what could I do when Monsieur [Provence] himself begged me not to go, and the Marshal de Broglie, as commander, replied: ’Yes, we can go to Metz, but what shall we do when we get there?’” The King then repeated sadly: “I missed my opportunity and it never came again.”24

  Instead of departing for the frontier, the King went to Paris on 17 July—without the Queen—with the intention of promoting calm. The Queen stayed at Versailles in a state of trepidation, having a presentiment that her husband would not return, a feeling underlined by the fact that Provence was instructed to assume full powers in his absence as Lieutenant General of the kingdom. But this presentiment at least was unjustified; the King was not detained. The Duke of Dorset thought it was “certainly one of the most humiliating steps that [the King] could possibly take,” describing him as being “like a tame bear” as he was “led in triumph” by the deputies and the city militia. One of those deputies leading “the bear” was a lawyer from Arras in his early thirties named Maximilien Robespierre who had, as a student, delivered a Latin address to the King on his coronation, but now embraced rather different political opinions.

  Louis XVI approved the appointments of Bailly as Mayor and La Fayette as commander of the National Guard, and in an important speech, mumbled something about his people being always able to count upon his love. Most significantly of all in this time of symbols, Louis XVI allowed himself to be displayed on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville (the City Hall) with the tricolour cockade, which Bailly called “the distinctive emblem of the French Nation,” in his hat.25

  “The Revolution in France has been carried out,” wrote the Russian Minister in Paris, Jean Simolin, to his Chancellor in St. Petersburg on 19 July, “and the royal authority annihilated.” He went on to comment on the ferocity that the French had displayed in its course—he was referring to the deaths of Bastille Day, the parading of heads on spikes. One read “with horror” of this same kind of French ferocity in accounts of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (of Huguenots, 200 years earlier). But as Simolin pointed out, there was a difference: this was political rather than religious fervour. Count Mercy, writing to Kaunitz, was equally emphatic that a revolution had taken place, “however unbelievable it may appear.” Mercy himself had had to retreat to the country and ask for guards at his Paris house, due to the hatred felt by the people for “the representative of the brother of the Queen.” Although the guards were granted, there was also a thorough (if unsuccessful) inspection of Mercy’s house for the great store of armaments that it was generally believed that he, being an Austrian, must have stored there.26

  So began that eerie summer at Versailles. Against a background of peasant revolts in various regions, inspired by a powerful if irrational emotion known as the “Great Fear”—in essence a panic about the safety of property, a number of measures were suggested in the National Assembly.27 It concentrated the mind that stones were thrown at t
he windows of the Archbishop of Paris, breaking them, on the night of 3 August. Males everywhere were transformed into members of the National Guard, mere valets becoming lieutenants and even the musicians in the Royal Chapel wearing military uniform, although Louis XVI drew the line at an Italian soprano dressed up as a grenadier. On the same date, the abolition of all feudal privileges was suggested; at the end of August La Fayette’s La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme was given official status.

  Meanwhile the Queen adopted the lowest possible profile. Although she was popularly supposed to have remained in France with the aim of destroying the National Assembly, while asking for 50,000 troops from her brother, she actually devoted her time to her children. As Joseph II told his brother Leopold on 3 August, the private role of mother was the only one that really suited their sister (something that the Emperor might perhaps have appreciated earlier).28 It was a foretaste of what life was to be like without the adult friends who were so vital to her.

  Yet all ceremony at Versailles could not be abandoned, any more than the King thought of abandoning the routine by which he hunted three or four times a week, including at the moment when the abolition of feudal privileges was raised. In England, Queen Charlotte reflected in her diary: “I often think that this cannot be the eighteenth century in which we live at present for Ancient History can hardly produce anything more Barbarous and Cruel than Our Neighbours in France.” She cheered herself up by reading a history of the reign of the absolutist Louis XIV, when things had been done so much better.29 Yet if much of Louis XVI’s royal authority had been stripped from him, he was still condemned to carry out the same court routine that his great ancestor had instituted—as was his Queen. Marie Antoinette gave the traditional party to celebrate the Feast of St. Louis on 25 August and found herself receiving the market-women, who arrived in some force from Paris. On the one hand they were exercising another traditional right—to pay their respects; on the other hand their presence reminded everyone exactly how short the twelve-mile route from Paris to Versailles really was. The figure of the majestic Queen who still presided over the most formal court in Europe contrasted with that of the despised woman, who by September was unable even to stroll upon the terraces for fear of hostile comment.